News | Nuclear Scientist Killed by Tehran Car Bomb

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An Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist was killed in a terrorist bomb blast in a Northern neighborhood in Tehran on Wednesday morning.

The magnetic bomb which was planted by an unknown motorcyclist under the car of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a professor at Tehran's technical university, also wounded two other Iranian nationals in Seyed Khandan neighborhood in Northern Tehran.

Ahmadi Roshan, 32, was a graduate of [Iran's] oil industry university and supervised a department at [the] Natanz uranium enrichment facility in Isfahan province. [...]

The blast took place on the second anniversary of the martyrdom of Majid Shahriari, a well-known Iranian nuclear scientist, on January 11, 2010. [Shahriari was actually killed on November 29, 2010.]

The [...] bombing method [in today's attack] was similar to the 2010 terrorist bomb attacks against the then university professor Fereidoun Abbassi Davani -- who is now the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization -- and his colleague Majid Shahriari, who were [targeted] in separate terrorist bomb attacks here in Tehran with the latter killed immediately [by] the blast.

Another Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, was also assassinated in a terrorist bomb attack in Tehran in January 2010.

(In addition to the killings mentioned by Fars, this past July an Iranian scientist -- variously identified as Dariush Rezaei Ochbelagh or, more plausibly, Dariush Rezaeinejad -- was shot to death at close range by motorcycle-riding gunmen in front of his Tehran residence. That assassination victim's possible connection to the Iranian nuclear program remains uncertain.)

Mehr News Agency specifies Ahmadi Roshan's position as "deputy director of commercial department of the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility." According to Mehr, he studied chemical engineering at Sharif University, from which he graduated in 2002: "Sharif University issued a statement expressing condolences to the Iranian people over the martyrdom of Roshan by elements of countries hostile to the Islamic Republic."

Press TV reports that eyewitnesses "say they saw a motorcycle attach a sticky bomb to a car near a college of Allameh Tabatabaei University" (see video).

IRNA reports that the two other victims were passengers in Ahmadi Roshan's car, a Peugeot 405, and that the incident took place in Ketabi Square (about one half mile north of Seyed Khandan Bridge). According to the state news agency, "A security official told IRNA that the incident looked like previous terrorist attacks on nuclear scientists by agents of the Zionist regime."

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